Lincoln's Shakespearean Education

Few figures have received more popular and scholarly attention than Abraham Lincoln – and yet few works have focused on the impact of his self-education. Tradition holds that this education consisted primarily in reading “Shakespeare and the Bible.” Taking this characterization seriously, Lincoln’s Shakesperean Education focuses on the great American statesman’s engagement with the great English playwright, while still giving Scripture its due along the way. Through close and careful readings of the president’s favorite plays, Ted Richards demonstrates how Shakespeare influenced Lincoln’s political thought, rhetoric, and statesmanship, and examines the impact this poetry had on his personal life. Students of Lincoln and Shakespeare will benefit from the new and sometimes surprising insights that Richards presents, while ambitious and aspiring autodidacts will find in the great emancipator a truly liberal course of study and a worthy model to emulate.